AQUAnomics

Learn more about AQUA, the token that powers Aquarius.

Just a few short days ago, we announced Aquarius, our upcoming project built on Stellar.

With Aquarius, our goal is to improve liquidity on Stellar by adding incentives for Stellar DEX traders and AMM liquidity providers, allowing Stellar users to benefit from larger swaps and trades on the network with less price impact thanks to deeper liquidity. We believe more liquid markets on Stellar will attract a greater audience from other networks where fees are higher or transactions are slower.

♒️ AQUA token

The AQUA token is at the center of Aquarius and, to date*, has over 179,000 trustlines enabled, with thousands of people participating across our community channels. Thanks to everyone who gave us their feedback. We are thrilled to see your support. ❤️

It is now time to dive deeper into AQUA and learn how you can earn AQUA tokens and what you can do with them. 🤿

💰 Earn rewards
The core aim of Aquarius is to add incentives for market makers and liquidity providers who provide liquidity for specific market pairs. This is achieved by distributing AQUA tokens every hour to those contributing liquidity on specific markets found at aqua.network/rewards.

Liquidity providers can simply deposit funds into AMMs to provide liquidity, whereas market makers help keep order books with individual orders. Anyone can be a liquidity provider or market maker, from financial organizations to regular traders when they place a limit order in an order book.

Without liquidity providers and market makers, markets would likely have rather low liquidity, creating environments where anyone buying or selling an asset on low liquidity markets would significantly move an asset's price.

In the world of Stellar, users have two ways to buy and sell assets. One is to make a limit order that will cross over an existing order on an order book, and the second is to make a swap (path payment). These techniques require the Stellar network to match orders in order books or AMMs, therefore taking liquidity from markets. So, clearly, the Stellar network as a whole would benefit from having more market makers and more liquidity in the order books.

🗳️ Voting
Aquarius allows the community of AQUA holders to signal where liquidity is needed through a voting process. This introduces an additional liquidity management layer for the whole Stellar network.

AQUA token holders decide via voting at aqua.network/vote which market pairs need liquidity the most and also define the size of market maker rewards for each pair.

For example, Carlos has 10,000 AQUA tokens. Carlos typically holds XLM, USDC, and an anchored BTC asset. He also needs to send payments to Argentina, in ARST (Argentinian peso), so he wants to ensure there’s enough liquidity on the following market pairs: XLM/USDC, XLM/BTC, and USDC/ARST. This would help him to trade XLM and BTC with low fees as well as send cheap cross-border payments to Argentina.

Hence Carlos could use the following allocation of his votes to prioritize the ARST pair but also give some votes to the other two pairs:
- USDC/ARST: 7000 AQUA (70% of votes)
- XLM/USDC: 2000 AQUA (20% of votes)
- XLM/BTC: 1000 AQUA (10% of votes)

The voting happens on-chain, so the votes can be independently validated by any user. Voting works with most Stellar wallets, including hardware wallets such as Ledger.

After each round of voting, Aquarius aggregates the individual votes of all Stellar users. Based on the results it defines a list of markets where the incentives will be activated.

🌟 AQUA in Stellar apps
AQUA token holders can also be entitled to additional benefits across other Stellar ecosystem projects. For example, Ultra Stellar introduced a cashback system into their LOBSTR and StellarX apps where those who hold certain amounts of AQUA get cashback on their crypto purchases and increased referral bonuses paid in AQUA. These are just some of the benefits that have been introduced for token holders by projects, with more expected as we expand.

🥧 AQUA allocation

100B AQUA tokens have been issued on the Stellar network. This is a hard limit on the total supply. No more AQUA tokens will ever be created.

Token Details:
asset code: AQUA
home domain: aqua.network
issuer account: GBNZ…67AQUA

The initial allocation is as follows:

• 50% dedicated to SDEX traders and AMM liquidity providers in the form of rewards:50,000,000,000 AQUA
• 20% set for airdrops. All unclaimed AQUA will be allocated to Community DAO fund. Read below to learn more.
  Airdrops + DAO:20,000,000,000 AQUA
• 10% offered to institutional investors with a 3-year vesting: 10,000,000,000 AQUA
• 10% granted to Aquarius team members and future employees with a 3-year vesting: 10,000,000,000 AQUA
• 5% allocated to voting and staking rewards: 5,000,000,000 AQUA
• 2.5% granted to advisors and partners (both with 3-year vesting): 2,500,000,000 AQUA
• 2.5% reserved for an emergency fund: 2,500,000,000 AQUA

💦 AQUA distribution

IMPORTANT UPDATES (February 2024)
Airdrop 1 concluded in January 2022 and can no longer be participated in.

Airdrop 2 is still ongoing! But you needed to have qualified when we took the snapshot in January 2022. To check if you qualified, head to aqua.network/airdrop2.

Most of the created AQUA tokens are allocated for market maker rewards, but the initial AQUA distribution will happen via an airdrop.

There will be two airdrops, and the first one will happen on August 16, 2021. Stellar accounts that made at least one trade on SDEX before 01.01.2021 00:00:00 UTC will be rewarded.

5% of the AQUA supply will be distributed during the first airdrop — we will share the full details very soon. 15% of the AQUA supply is allocated for the second airdrop. Every account that has qualified for the first or the second airdrop will receive the tokens in equal parts over the course of a few months.

You don’t need to take any special actions to qualify for the first airdrop, but we highly recommend to follow us on social networks to track Aquarius news and project developments.

For the first airdrop, we will use a new feature of the Stellar network called “claimable balances” which was introduced in protocol 15. Please ensure you’re using a wallet that supports this functionality to claim your AQUA tokens. Applications like StellarX, LOBSTR, and StellarTerm have already added claimable balance support for our airdrops.

Every eligible Stellar account will have 30 days to claim the AQUA airdrop payment. Unclaimed tokens will be moved to the Community DAO fund. AQUA holders will collectively decide how to spend AQUA in the DAO treasury.

Additional information about upcoming airdrops will be published on our Medium soon.

🗞 Subscribe

• Website: https://aqua.network/
• Join Aquarius on socials: Twitter, Telegram
• Learn more about Ultra Stellar products and services: website, Twitter

If you have any ideas on how we can make Aquarius better, reach out at hello@aqua.network.

For partnerships and institutional investments, contact us at tokens@aqua.network.

*As of February 2024